Image Credits:- Many thanks to Joan Livingston and Lynsey Adams (Reading Between the Lines Book Vlog) for supplying author and book cover pictures and Sarah Holbrook for supplying a further two author shots. Other images were created in Book Brush using their images or Pixabay photos.
It can be a small world. The same applies to the writing one. I’ve followed Joan Livingston (via her Substack) for some time and recently discovered she is a friend of Val Penny, whom I met at The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick and have interviewed here. Now it is Joan’s turn to be put under the spotlight.
This interview forms part of Joan’s blog tour for her new book in her Isabel Long series, Finding The Source. The blog tour has been organised by Lynsey Adams from the Reading Between the Lines Book Vlog.
There is another first too. I’ve often interviewed crime writers, especially Val Penny and Wendy H. Jones, though their series are set in Scotland. Joan’s Isabel Long series is set in rural New England. But wherever a crime story is set, there will be keen readers. Crime is one of the most popular fiction genres. In fiction, at least, justice can be seen to be done and that has huge appeal. Crime stories can also act as puzzles for the reader to solve. Again, that has immense appeal.
For a series, readers also have the joy of following the characters through several stories and seeing how they develop over time.
Before I quiz Joan, please find below her author biography and a blurb for Finding The Source.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Joan Livingston is the author of novels for adult and young readers, including the Isabel Long Mystery Series, featuring a longtime journalist who becomes an amateur P.I. solving cold cases in rural New England. Finding the Source is the eighth book in the series.
Joan draws upon her own experience as a longtime journalist in Massachusetts and New Mexico to create Isabel Long, a sassy, savvy widow who uses the skills she acquired in the business to solve what appears to be impossible cases. She also relies on her deep knowledge of rural Western Massachusetts, where she lives, to create realistic characters and settings.
Also check out Joan’s My Story page on her website.
BLURB
A homeless man. His murdered mother. A book could be the clue.
Isabel Long’s next case begins during a chance encounter with a homeless man, who says he was 12 when he found his mother murdered in their home.
Abby McKenzie was a well-liked seller of vintage books who owned a store in the hilltown of Dillard. That was 43 years ago and the case was never solved.
One obstacle is that several of the suspects are dead, including an avid book collector, a former town official who stalked her, and the man who last saw her alive. Another is that, once again, Isabel must deal with Dillard’s police chief, who ran interference in her other cases.
But that doesn’t deter Isabel nor her mother Maria, her partner in solving crime. She just needs to find the source who will unlock this case.
Question Time
Allison: Welcome to Chandler’s Ford Today, Joan.
Joan: Thank you, Allison. My pleasure.
Joan, you worked as a journalist for a long time for the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Did you feel it would lead you into a career as a novelist, especially as you started with poetry? What did encourage the leap into prose writing? Did your journalistic background help when it came to creating characters as you must have met so many interesting people in your time at the paper?
Being a journalist helped me break a ten-year writer’s block. I had written poetry in college and afterward, and wanted to move onto prose, in particular, novels, but despite many attempts, I was unsuccessful although I still thought of myself as a writer. Of course, this coincided with raising six kids, so I’d like to think I put my creative energy into them. I also became a big reader during that time, tackling whatever I could get my hands on at the local library, and those authors became my teachers.
I started as a correspondent, covering the rural hilltown of Worthington, population 1,200. I got paid by the inch. Besides finally putting one word behind another, being a reporter immersed me in rural New England, which is the chief setting for my novels. I listened to the way people talked and observed how they behaved. I believe it helps me create credible characters and dialogue. Another way journalism helped is that my writing tends to be fast paced, and I keep my chapters short, which readers say they enjoy.
However, I didn’t start writing a novel until I was promoted in 1999 to being an editor, which meant I no longer had to create news and feature stories. I just had to fine tune them. I eventually became editor-in-chief for newspapers in Taos, New Mexico and Western Massachusetts — not bad for someone who never took a journalism course.
Being a journalist also helps me figure out what questions Isabel, who was one herself, would ask a suspect or person of interest. Like Isabel, I feel journalism has many transferable skills. I could have been a spy, but I wouldn’t have wanted the danger.
When did you know Isabel Long was going to become a long running series? What are the joys and challenges of writing series novels? How do you keep on top of what you need to know to be able to write the next?
Before I finished the first Isabel Long mystery, I realized the potential for a series. The inspiration — those what-ifs — for the next often kicks in before I finish the one I’m writing. What if the setting for a murder was at a country fair’s demolition derby? What if her former boss asks Isabel to find his sister, who was a baby when she was kidnapped? What if a successful literary agent was found shot in the head at his country home?
Finding the Source was inspired by a real encounter on the day of my mother’s funeral. My husband and I were taking a walk when a stranger came across a library lawn to announce his mother had been killed many years ago and her case never solved. I asked for details and checked later online what he said was true. My husband told me, “How do you attract such people?” I told him, “I’m lucky, I guess.” Isabel and her mother have a similar experience, but in that case I made the man homeless and gave him his own story.
Here’s a fun anecdote. One of my readers, a friend who lives in the same village, was being a wise guy one day. I told him I was going to bump him off in a book. I forgot I said that, but he and a friend didn’t. So Tim Todd became a character in the series. When I signed his copy of Following the Lead, I wrote: “It was a pleasure killing you off in this book.”
I have to say one of the joys in writing a series is to give Isabel Long new challenges, both as a private investigator and as a widow now involved in a relationship with a local guy. And I can hold onto my other characters.
One of the challenges is making sure what happens is consistent, including dates, locations, and people’s backgrounds.
I love the way you have fed in snippets of back story in Finding The Source and I can confirm these work wonderfully as I have not read any of your other novels in the Isabel Long series (yet, at least!). Yet I could picture things beautifully and the back story made sense without being overwhelming or holding the current story back by slowing the pace. How have you managed to get the balance of back and current story right so readers familiar to your work and those new to it still get plenty from it? A lot of work must go into that.
Thank you. I have read and watched enough mystery series to know I don’t want to bore my readers with too much background info in each book. I aim to give enough that someone who picked up a book anywhere in the series will understand what’s happening. For those who have read the series from the start, it will be like sharing a bit of insider information.
I write flash fiction and short stories so create a lot of characters. Sometimes I can reuse characters in linked flash but you do this all of the time for a series. What made me laugh out loud was coming across Isabel’s nicknames for recurring characters such as the Bald Old Fart. Instant imagery created for me of said Old Fart and Isabel. When did you know your characters were “coming to life” for you to be able to do this?
I believe being a big day dreamer as a child and then a young adult, coming up with stories on how I wish life was happening, prepared me for that. I don’t know where the characters in my books come from, but I see, hear, and watch what they do in my mind. They have all become very real to me. Yes, I see the Old Farts gossiping in the backroom of the general store and teasing Isabel when she visits them. I watch Isabel relate to the customers at the Rooster, where she works part-time as a bartender. In Finding the Source, I so enjoyed creating a tense situation when Isabel seeks information from an obsessive book collector.
I always ask this question of authors new to CFT. Can you share three writing tips you have found useful? Can you also share three marketing ones which you put to good use? I feel no one writer can know all there is to know on these topics so collective knowledge is useful for us all!
I frequently meet people who have a story to share, but don’t know how to go about doing it, so I offer them a few tips. The first is to aim for 500 words a day, which is my daily goal. This is a doable amount that adds up quickly. The second is “take what you know and have your way with it.” The third is one I’ve kept from a creative writing professor in college: “Write like it’s never been written before.”
One more thing I tell wannabe authors is to forget how the publishing industry once worked with hard cover and paperbacks only. Most of your sales will be digital, and if you go that route, audiobooks.
As for marketing, there is writing and then there is the business of writing. For most, the first part is easier. I am a hybrid author, in that I have a publisher, Bloodhound Books, and I self-publish most of my books. That amount increased after a previous publisher closed. Finding the Source is the 17th book I’ve published thus far. I depend heavily on social media, including Substack, my new favourite, to get the word out. I also use paid promotions carefully.
As I mentioned, most of my book sales are digital, but I am fortunate my son, Zack, carries my books at his Floodwater Brewing taproom in the Shelburne Falls village where I live, which I sell at a big discount. That’s helped to create a local following. Then there are those who find me online. I am grateful for each reader. I suggest seeking out local writing groups, a good way to make connections. And I never turn down the opportunity to do a reading.
I can’t give a lot of description in my flash tales but I do pick one telling detail which will show a lot about a character. I liked the mention of Isabel’s shoe size (11.5) which gave me a good mental image of someone who must be tall to have a shoe size like that. How do you work out which telling details to use for your characters? Are you looking to create strong mental images in your readers’ minds or looking for the impact the detail will have on readers? I laughed at the mention of Mary’s Salon with its slogan of We Do Men Too. The empty storefronts was another powerful image especially since many of us in the UK will remember much loved stores (such as Debenhams) closing. That kind of thing has resonance no matter where you are. How do you pick what to include? How do you decide what to exclude, at least for the current book you’re working on?
I don’t want to bore readers with long descriptions, so as you mentioned, I choose just enough to give readers a picture in their brains. Perhaps that comes from being a poet in my early writing days, making descriptions succinct. Keep in mind Isabel is the one telling the story, and she has an eye and mind for detail, essential to being a private investigator.
Isabel talks to her readers which I loved. There is something intimate and immediate about this. When did you decide Isabel had to “tell her own story” in this way?
It just flowed that way from the start. A close friend wrote a mystery, and I decided, why not try it. So I sat at my computer and without sounding like a nut, the words to the opening of the first Isabel Long book just came as first-person present tense. It made sense since I wanted Isabel to tell the story and readers to feel they are part of the action, that they solve the mystery with her. I so enjoy it when a reader tells me they, too, couldn’t figure it out until the end.
Name one specific thing you love about writing series. Name one specific thing which frustrates you about writing series.
I love writing a series because, as I mentioned earlier, I can hold onto the characters I created and give them something else to do. A person might be a suspect in one case and then hires Isabel for another. Her former boss asks her to investigate a case from his childhood. Or a person who hired her becomes a friend. There are the people she relies on for info such as the Old Farts, those gossipy old men, plus her network of sources including customers at the Rooster.
The one frustrating part? I know at some point I will end the series.
How do you find promoting a series works out? The advantage of promoting one single book is you can focus on that but for a series, there must be challenges to doing this well.
Actually, I see an advantage to having a series. I do write each book to stand on its own, but my hope is someone reads one book, gets hooked, and wants to read more. Finding the Source is the eighth book. When I hear from readers or meet them locally, the most frequent question is when is the next one coming out?
Do you have a favourite character in the Isabel Long series, assuming it isn’t Isabel? Also, in the character -v- plot debate, where do you stand and why? I focus on character and find the plot comes from them. This is because when I read, I want to find out what happens to the character, what they do etc. I take an interest in the plot only once the characters have gripped me.
I would say my books, including the Isabel Long Mystery Series, are character-driven. I let them lead the story. People will often tell me their favourite characters in the series, including the Old Farts and Isabel’s mother, Maria. I have had a couple of people beg me never to kill off her mother. Ha, I don’t have any plans to do that.
Now, if I had to choose a favourite, as you requested, I would say Annette Waters aka the Tough Cookie, Isabel’s nickname for her. She first appears in the second book, Redneck’s Revenge when she hires Isabel to investigate the death of her father, who supposedly was too drunk to get out of his shack of a house when it burned.
Annette, a single mother who inherited her father’s junkyard and garage, pays Isabel with free mechanical service for life. I am so fond of Annette — as is Isabel — she keeps turning up in Isabel’s life and investigations. For instance, Annette has a band appropriately called the Junkyard Dogs. Finding the Source has a very humorous scene involving her and Isabel when the Junkyard Dogs play on Halloween at the Rooster. I am not going to spoil it by giving it away.
Who are your own favourite crime writers? Outside of your own genre, who would be your favourite writers and why?
Ah, there are so many crime writers to choose, but honestly, I enjoy those who carry me through a story, have interesting characters, and fool me until the end. Right now, I am hooked on books by Allen Eskens, an American author who was a former defense attorney. Across the pond, I enjoy Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series. I also follow crime writers I know personally, such as Val Penny, who has one of my favourite characters, DI Hunter Wilson, and Teresa Dovalpage, whose mysteries are connected to Cuba where she grew up.
Outside of the crime genre, I have many favourite authors, as my bookcases would attest. They include Sherman Alexie, Colson Whitehead, Percival Everett, Russell Banks, Annie Proulx, Kent Haruf, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Harper Lee, Frederick Fullerton, and so many more.
Conclusion
Many thanks, Joan, for a fabulous interview and I hope Finding The Source does well. Crime stories can be wonderful escapist entertainment, which seems a little odd considering what the genre is, but people love a mystery, they love to see justice done, and crime tales can meet those needs. A strong character such as Isabel Long is a great way to get people hooked into series too.
LINKS TO BUY- FINDING THE SOURCE
JOAN LIVINGSTON – WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
Related Posts:-
Read interviews with Chandler’s Ford writer Allison Symes: Part 1 and Part 2.
Read blog posts by Allison Symes published on Chandler’s Ford Today.
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